THE
CHILDREN OF RED PEAK
Craig
DiLouie
Published
by Redhook. 384 pages. 2021
Available
in paperback, kindle and audio.
Religious
Doomsday cults are always fascinating – though God forbid anyone reading this review
should ever be unlucky or foolish enough to join one. Sometimes, however, there
isn’t a choice. especially if a child’s parents are drawn into one. That’s
sheer bad luck.
As
it is with “the children” of Red Peak, whose parents are attracted to what is at
first an easy-going, almost paradisical cult intent on returning to a simpler life
in a farming community of like-minded individuals, safe from the stresses of
modern life.
They
have a hierarchy of elders – Shepherds – under the guidance of a Moses-like
figure, the Reverend Peale, whose gentle understanding helps to temper the sometimes
more hard-line attitudes of those under him. But it is this same leader who
eventually turns the group onto a path that takes them to self-destruction, after
he temporarily takes a leave of absence to go on a pilgrimage of personal enlightenment
– and sees God.
It
is this eye-opening event on the heights of Red Peak, an isolated mountain
range some distance from where they live, that changes everything. When their
leader returns he informs the group that God has told him the End Times are about
to take place and they have been selected to be part of the elite that will
ascend to Heaven when this happens. To be saved, though, they must abandon
their pastoral paradise and journey with him to Red Peak, where he saw and
spoke with God. There they will establish a new community to await their salvation.
All
of this is told in retrospect through the four surviving children who decades
later meet at the funeral of the only other child to have lived through the
terrible final weeks of the cult. Unable to bear her memories of what happened
any longer, the suicides, murders and self-mutilations that occurred that day,
she has ended her life. Which brings the
suppressed memories of all the traumas the others suffered back to the surface,
as well as questions they have struggled to deal with over the years: What
really happened that day? Why did the loving, kind-hearted Reverend persuade
their parents and everyone else to kill themselves – or to kill those who were
unwilling to do it themselves? Was it really God the Reverend saw? If so, what
kind of “God” was it?
Worse
still, no amount of searching by the authorities had ever been able to find any
trace of those who died, as if their bodies really did ascend to heaven,
leaving a mystery behind that people still talk about with awe.
Now
grown into adults, the survivors have built careers for themselves, though
their choices appear in some ways not much more than desperate attempts to
block from their minds what they glimpsed, suspected, or worried happened,
unable to move from beneath the shadow of that awful event during which they not
only lost their parents but most of their friends too. It is the violence of
what took place that haunts them, as some of the parents murdered their own
children to “save” them, and, during the days before the apocalypse, cult
members tried to exculpate whatever sins they thought they had committed through
acts of self-mutilation. One mother, who had become convinced she was too fond
of talking, cut out her tongue, while another, because she was vain about her
looks, savaged her own face. The compulsion to carry out bloody acts against
themselves, is yet another trauma with which the survivors have had to deal.
Their
reunion at the funeral acts as a catalyst towards what happens next – because they
know that whatever drew their parents to Red Peak is still there, if not in
reality at least in their minds. Is it God? Does the mountain really hold a
path towards heaven? Is there still time in which to seek their own redemption
for everything that happened? Or to find out what really took place there – and
why?
This
is a fascinating tale, told from the viewpoints of the four survivors who
decide their only hope to move on with their lives is to return to Red Peak to
try and find answers to their questions. It is a decision that will awaken more
than just memories, though, and their determination to clear up the horrors of
the past, when their childhoods came to a hideous end, builds towards a
chilling climax of what is a brilliantly visualised and illuminating tale.
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